A few weeks ago, there was a sense of deep concern and foreboding in our household. In very quick succession, we had two of our family members who received notice that they could be coming down with a severe illness. I would have dearly liked to be able to report here that both instances were cases of false alarm, but alas the fact of the matter is that my stepfather has been recently diagnosed with what appears to be a severe and somewhat advanced case of cancer.
Amidst these discoveries, at a time which now feels like quite an age ago, I tried my best to carry myself with the usual and expected dignity of a Malay man: no overt or unnecessary displays of emotion or anguish, and to show concern without allowing the maelstrom of feelings to affect my day-to-day doings too much. I would like to think, in fact, that as I have gotten older, I am becoming better at being able to be genuine and sincere in my dealings with my emotions: not to hide them, or ignore them, nor to allow them to overpower me. I wanted to feel, without being buried or thrown overboard by those feelings.
So I reached for my usual method of coping in times of difficulty and anguish: I looked for something to read, that would help me make sense of what was going on. The idea is that with more that you know about something, the less mysterious, and hopefully the less scary that thing becomes. I reached out to Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of all Maladies, a Pulitzer Prize-winning exploration of cancer, and the ongoing medical and scientific efforts to understand, treat, and conquer cancer. It was calming to know that this disease, which was and is eating up a loved one, had a name, and a history, and a present and future chronicle of valiant efforts to combat and defeat it. Learning and understanding helped me to know what it was that our family would have to deal with.
I had a similar episode for this, a few years ago. The demise of my father-in-law in 2018 threw me into my own form of soul-searching. Knowing what I knew of his life, and how he struggled to cope with his final years on this earth, I was struggling on my own with the idea of death, and what it means to live a good life so that one could welcome a good death. I went into a sprint of reading: books like Katherine Mannix’s With the End in Mind and Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air were my guides and companions in a process that lasted for many months (and, in truth, probably is still ongoing.) I went back to the Qur’an, sometimes reading the translations and exegeses to comprehend the meanings of the words, but most often, just reciting the words out loud and meditating with the melody and grammar of Holy Scripture.
There are many ways to cope with shock and sadness and grief – my weapon of choice is the soothing rain of words and understanding. None of this is going to take away the sharp pain of loss that I am bracing myself for, knowing that it will come, perhaps sooner than I am prepared for. But I also know that this is part of what it means to be truly alive.
In an interview with The Times Magazine, Cormac McCarthy, one of my favourite authors who had passed away only recently, had said that he considered only a short list of authors, including Melville, Dostoyevsky and Faulker, as “good writers”, and omitted many others such as Proust and James who do not “deal with issues of life and death”. In the McCarthyian scheme of literature and life, it is the contest with death that is the one and true genuine drama of human existence.
These words, these words
they come down upon me
like gentle rain at night
They tell me,
"it's going to be okay"
as my courage takes flight
Amidst the pain, amidst the blight
A thousand curses I defied.